Editorial: Don't punish developed nations with climate rules

The two-week worldwide climate summit in Doha, Qatar, ended amid gloom last weekend, with only 37 of the 195 participating nations agreeing to extend the ineffectual Kyoto treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

As Reuters news agency reported, “many of those most concerned about climate change are close to despair.”

But taxpayers here and in other developed nations can sigh in relief. The United States never joined the Kyoto Protocol requiring dramatic, costly reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and since its adoption in 1997, China, Russia, Japan and Canada abandoned the treaty. Kyoto expires in 2014, but the United Nations-sponsored conference managed to extend to 2015 a new deadline for countries to rejoin.

The 37 nation members left generate only 15 percent of worldwide emissions. Whatever future reductions they may make promise to be overwhelmed by increasing emissions in other nations as their economies expand. Despite not being a signatory to Kyoto, the U.S., which generates 25 percent of the world’s output, saw its emissions decline slightly in recent years, partly due to the recession.

As conference attendees left air-conditioned hotels and boarded jetliners, Reuters reported, “For the world as a whole this year, [emissions] are expected to rise by 2.6 percent, up 58 percent since 1990.”

China and India, classified as “emerging economies,” account for most of the growth.

The real issue for years has been developing nations essentially demanding reparations from developed nations like the U.S. because of their increasing greenhouse gas emissions. This massive global transfer of wealth supposedly would compensate for ravages of global warming, which conference attendees claim is rising dangerously and blame on elevated greenhouses gases.

But the alleged damage is largely illusory, while emission growth is intimately related to industrial growth. That is why growing and already prosperous countries are reluctant to drastically reduce their emissions, let alone pay other nations. Moreover, those claiming that rising emissions have much to do to prove their case.

It doesn’t help that for 16 years, temperatures have not increased, even as CO2 has soared. A new Princeton University satellite analysis also concludes that future rising sea levels, perhaps the most frightening of predictions, have been seriously overestimated, the U.K. Register reported during the conference.

The theory of catastrophic manmade global warming is predicated on there being a high sensitivity to increases in CO2 in the atmosphere that results in higher temperatures.

So it also doesn’t help the cause that, “one-third of all human emissions of CO2 have occurred since 1998. And temperatures haven’t budged as a result,” writes Tom Fuller, a global warming believer and co-author of “Climategate.” He concludes, that “makes it exceedingly difficult to use the past 15 years as evidence of a very high sensitivity of the atmosphere to CO2.”

The Doha conference, however, seemed more concerned with politics and wealth transfers than CO2 and warming.

Developed countries, to their credit, still resist demands to transfer their wealth as punishment for their success.

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